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6:51am July 18, 2014

➸ Queer Disability Conference Cal Montgomery

Barriers tend to be a lot easier to recognize from one side than from the other: for every bunch of people looking up and trying to figure out how to break through a glass ceiling, there’s another bunch of people looking down and genuinely wondering how come none of them just come on up.

A couple of quick questions….
How many of you think that this conference is accessible?
Now, how many think it’s inaccessible?

Events and locations and communities are accessible to specific people, for specific purposes. If I say something is “accessible” or “inaccessible,” without specifying to whom and for what, I’m speaking nonsense.

Of course, it’s not usually recognized as nonsense, because we’ve come to a common understanding about the to whom and the for what. When speakers leave them out, listeners fill in the blanks, and pretty much everyone knows that asking “Is this building accessible?” won’t help you find out whether there’s a TTY in the lobby.

We fill in the blanks so automatically that many of us have come to believe that access is a matter of ramps and lifts, period.

A great deal of disability rights struggle has focused on architectural barriers and transit barriers, the idea being that if you can’t get to a space and then get into it, you don’t have access to whatever is inside. Which is true … but getting through the door isn’t everybody’s biggest problem.